Quotes from Tom Stoppard

Guildenstern: What's the first thing you remember? Rosencrantz: [thinks] No, it's no good. It was a long time ago. Guildenstern: No, you don't take my meaning. What's the first thing you remember after all the things you've forgotten? Rosencrantz: Oh, I see... I've forgotten the question.

How is a juggler you can't hear or see or smell or touch different to no juggler at all?

Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --

The Plastic People of the Universe played 'Venus in Furs' from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.

They had it in for us, didn't they? Right from the beginning. Who'd have thought that we were so important?

No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination.

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice...

As her tutor you have a duty to keep her in ignorance.

Do not dabble in paradox, Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit.

Mr Hodge, ignorance should be like an empty vessel waiting to be filled at the well of truth – not a cabinet of vulgar curios.

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.

Consistency is all I ask!

Septimus: There is nothing more to be said about sexual congress. Thomasina: Is it the same as love? Septimus: Oh no, it is much nicer than that.

Thomasina: Septimus, what is carnal embrace? Septimus: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

By why, Ligurinus, alas why this unaccustomed tear trickling down my cheek? – why does my glib tongue stumble to silence as I speak? At night I hold you fast in my dreams, I run after you across the Field of Mars, I follow you into the tumbling waters, and you show no pity.

HENSLOWE: Mr. Fennyman, let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Believe me, to be closed by the plague is a bagatelle in the ups and downs of owning a theatre. FENNYMAN: So what do we do? HENSLOWE: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. FENNYMAN: How? HENSLOWE: I don't know, it's a mystery.

No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.

Mind reedetakse igal sammul. Ma ei usu inimesse, ja sina tahad, et ma usuksin jumalasse.

Your art has failed. You've turned literature into a religion and it's as dead as all the rest, it's an overripe corpse and you're cutting fancy figures at the wake. It's too late for geniuses! Now we need vandals and desecrators, simple-minded demolition men to smash centuries of baroque subtlety, to bring down the temple, and thus finally, to reconcile the shame and the necessity of being an artist!

If they are all so obsessed with change they should begin by changing for dinner.

I've always been given credit for my unconcern.

ROS My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz. Guil confers briefly with him. (Without embarrassment.) I'm sorry—his name's Guildenstern, and I'm Rosencrantz.

I burn with no causes